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EL TORO 

A MOTOR CAR STORY 
OF INTERIOR CUBA 



BY 
E. RALPH ESTEP 



DETROIT 

PACKARD MOTOR CAR COMPANY 

1909 

All Rights Reserved 



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Copyright, 1909 
Bv Packard Motor Car Company 






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Printed by 

The Matthews-Northrup Works 

Buffalo 



LIBRARY of CONGRESSl 
Two Cooies Received 

JUN & 1809 

/> Copyngnt Entry 

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

" Many of the mountain passes were so narrow * * * that 
we were forced to run with one wheel on a sloping side wall 
and the other on the crest of the deepest rut," . . Frontispiece 
" Once in awhile a good sort of winding dirt road gave promise 

of speed," *0 ^ 

" Insular urchins, partly curious and partly fearful, were half- 
hidden in the doorways," 22 s 

" Everywhere was stone * * * Each mile was gained by 

defiant effort," 22 

" A hill like a natural stairway of great, rough limestone steps," 28 < 
"The clearance of an ox cart is thirty-eight to forty-eight 

inches," SBf 

" At Jaruca, the whole town joined us at luncheon," .... 32 
" Through the clear rippling water of this first river the car shot 

with a great splurge," 36 ^ 

" We drove under the everlasting palms and among boulders 

half-hidden in the luxuriant grass," 44 f 

"On these ruts we tore tires off the wheels at two miles an 

hour," 56> 

" We enjoyed the rare experience of 'beating it,' " 56 

" Palm trees by the thousand, and, scattered among them, small 

ponds made by heavy rainfall," . 62 ' 

" The car looked like some big black beast, wallowing along in 

boundless marsh," 62 

" The valley became muddier and muddier," 68 f 

" The sun's farewell glance spread a woven gold mantilla on the 
naked shoulders of a grim, forbidding world and the motor 
car sank, helpless, into the mud as if, also, its day was 

done," 68 

" A river would be reached by following down a tortuous pass," 74 /■ 
" We had to ford * * * a fast flowing torrent set down in a 
gorge * * * which had no path leading to a crossing of 

any kind," 82. /- 

" Digging to obtain a footing for the wheels in the roughest 

ravines," 90 r 

" At last we found the promised highway," 100 , 

" The oldest cathedral in Cuba, weatherbeaten, but proudly 

rising over the low tiled houses of the town," 100 



PREFACE 

OCCASIONALLY business has experiences 
which are interesting on their own 
account. To set them down in * words is an 
agreeable task and entirely different from the 
making of business literature of the familiar 
kinds. This narrative is just the relation of what 
happened, when, on other business bent, we 
Strayed into the unknown and stayed to have a 
motoring experience, which was far enough from 
the conventional to deserve a place in the realm 
of adventure. The tale is here recounted in the 
hope that it will possess for others a degree of the 
interest which, for ourselves, has made it a sub- 
stantial part of our recollections. Most of all, 
ye unworthy scribe hopes that the narration will 
be acceptable to those who made it possible — to 
Sidney D. Waldon, father of the great idea and 
leading spirit of the enterprise resulting there- 
from, Edwin S. George, Fred Crebbin and 
Rogelio Gaarken. 

E. R. E. 
Detroit, April, 1909. 




CHAPTER I 

Direct not him, whose way himself will choose; 
' Tis breath thou lacFst, and that breath wilt thou lose. 

— Richard II. 

ED and vivid against 
the dense night, a 
camp fire of palm 
bark flared, fluttered, and 
went out. Its momentary 
glare illumined one of 
those strange scenes, occa- 
sioned by strange people 
marooned in a strange place, 
of the world, which seemed 
very far away, was shut out, on the 
one side, by a reef of palm trees sharply silhou- 
etted against the somber sky and, on the other, 
by a barrier of hills. 

" Are we up against it? " Crebbin spoke. 
" If you mean by 'it' that hill yonder, we are." 
Waldon answered. 

Three jaded men sat around the fire. Like the 
fire, their conversation had flamed and gone out. 
They gazed into the darkening embers, mused on 
the strangeness of some things and speculated on 

[ii] 




the final solution of the problem which was theirs 
by reason of their present whereabouts. A palm 
tree, which had never before enjoyed the com- 
pany of a four-wheeled vehicle, stood sentinel 
over an automobile, from whose tonneau pro- 
truded the feet of a folded and, presumably, 
sleeping figure. On a bed of brush slumbered 
the only one of the party who was native to the 
country and thereby accustomed to its hick of 
things comfortable. The others had abandoned 
this bed on which they could not sleep, had scoured 
the unfamiliar woods for fuel and had amused 
themselves by keeping an unnecessary fire ablaze, 
for the mere companionship of its warmth and 
for its light, which drove away the trepidation of 
loneliness. There was no noise, except the strange 
sounds from the underbrush and palm forests. 

The strangers were ourselves. The native was 
our interpreter. 

We were thirty miles from Havana, Cuba. In 
our sleepy thoughts, Cuba was a mighty big place, 
Havana far away and our own homes as distant 
and chimerical as the moon. The moon did not 
shine on that part of Cuba that night. We were 
a discouraged bunch, with only a few stars on 
which to hang our sense of location. Our hopes 
were in cold storage. We marveled at the wild- 
ness of a land that was figuratively but a few 
steps from the gay and careless Havana. We 
laughed hysterically at the recollection of our 
day's performance in bringing the car over the 
roadless country whose stone trails are followed 
only by ox carts and ponies. 

[ 12] 



Remembering we were bound across the island 
to one of the oldest of its very old towns, we 
realized that, when dawn should raise the curtain 
on the scene night had shut out, we would be al- 
most up against the impossible. * IJowever, we 
did not seek to pry into the future. We simply 
tried to neglect it. We were not sure where we 
were and we did not care very much, because it 
made no difference. It was just about as hard 
to get into and out of one place as another. We 
had learned much about Cuba in a few hours. 

We imitated sleep with apathy. Occasionally, 
we tried to bring the real world back to us, by 
noisily gathering more fallen palm bark for the 
fire. Palm bark makes a poor fire for the cheer- 
ing of lonely spirits. It is a fickle stimulant, the 
effect being great while it lasts, but it does not 
last long enough to give any real comfort. The 
dead, dark, cold night was depressing. 

We were startled like children when the thun- 
dering of near-by hoofs awoke us to the fact that 
we were no longer alone. The insurgents were 
busy in Cuba just then and we had not been there 
long enough to learn that Cuba and insurgents 
are not bad, but just naughty. The disturbers 
were as surprised as we. One was a country 
doctor who was riding miles to visit a stricken 
" spiggotie " in some distant hut. 

A spiggotie is any kind of a provincial Cuban, 
when mentioned by an outsider. He is one of 
that species of uncertain race which populates the 
Spanish-American countries and makes it difficult 
for a visitor to draw a color line between negro 

[ 13] 



and Castillian blood. I have also met spiggoties 
who were a charming mixture of Spanish, negro, 
and Chinese. 

The doctor looked down from his pony at us 
in wonder. His servant on the other pony 
was alarmed. Presumably, he never had seen an 
automobile before. Having lived in the midst 
of three or four puny wars and one real one, he 
showed the common spiggotie attitude of being 
suspicious of everything that was not Cuban and 
regular. The doctor gave us the customary 
"que hay," and we awakened the interpreter to 
say it back to him. 

A Cuban does not say much, but he uses a lot 
of words on the job and is willing to put a highly 
dramatic touch to the most trivial question or 
remark. Our interpreter was fully impressed 
with the honor of being a part of the first auto- 
mobile expedition across the rough provinces of 
Cuba. The rattle of Spanish was like two kettle 
drums in action together. 

Evidently, the doctor asked all that could be 
asked and the interpreter told him more about us 
than we could have told him. We tried to break 
into the conversation, but the interpreter was dis- 
posed to consider our assistance as a hindrance. 
We pried one unconsoling fact out of him. The 
doctor thought we were more than right in sup- 
posing we might be up against it. He named 
about a hundred rivers and a thousand hills 
which were impassable. He explained that the 
trail we were following did not lead anywhere, 
that there was no trail which led anywhere and 

[ 14] 



that there was no road which could be followed. 
He said that we would have to go back. Then 
he said that we could not go back. That we had 
come this far seemed only to impress him with 
the fact that we must have dropped out of a cloud 
or come in an airship. It was certainly impos- 
sible to make him believe we had driven an auto- 
mobile from Havana. 

Thirty miles is a short distance for an auto- 
mobile in some places. Between Philadelphia 
and New York it is a matter of thirty minutes. 
It had been a matter of five or six hours with us, 
there in Cuba. We were glad to have the doctor 
go on his way, for we had heard enough about 
deep rivers, steep hills, walls of rock, and crooked 
gullies. We wanted to think about something 
else until daylight. At least we had rather think 
about what had been than what was to come. It 
seemed strange that so much could have hap- 
pened in the last twenty-four hours. 

There was an element of humor in our plight, 
but we were not in a humorous mood. There 
was great beauty in the wild, dark night for those 
who were used to the quiet, homespun nights of 
Wayne County, Michigan. We knew that we 
were missing the enchantment of the hour, but 
we were not in the mood to mind missing any- 
thing. 

We were the victims of our own imagination 
rather than the victims of circumstances. We 
had imagined that Cuba was a sort of national park 
with an immense system of boulevards. There 
is one magnificent highway in Cuba, fifty-two 

[ is] 



miles long, which reaches from Havana to San 
Cristobal. In publicity it reaches around the 
world. It has been the course of automobile road 
races. Automobile writers, attending said auto- 
mobile races, wrote columns about the beautiful 
Cubaland, in which the wandering motorist from 
the north may drive as fast as he likes, while 
balmy breezes blow across the palm-sentineled 
macadam. The government has started a road 
from Havana eastward across the island. Some 
of this has been surveyed, a little of it graded 
and it actually exists for a half-dozen miles out 
of Havana. Down in Santiago province, General 
Wood has built a road or two. The middle of 
the island is roadless. There is no continuous 
travel by vehicle. 

Havana presents a wrong idea of Cuba. It is 
a tourists' town. It has boulevards and carriages. 
Cuba has wandering trails and ox carts. No four- 
wheeled vehicle is used outside the towns. Prob- 
ably no vehicle of any kind, unless in time of 
war, ever has made a continuous journey across 
the island. The ox carts are for local travel. 
Cross country travel is on foot or on ponies. 

Yesterday, on the little coast steamer which 
carried us across the gulf, we had discussed with 
eager expectance the fascinations of touring in 
Cuba, as presented in the steamship company's 
alluring pamphlets. We had come south with a 
Packard car to run it fast and furiously for thou- 
sands and thousands of miles under hot weather 
conditions. A Cuban on the steamer listened 
while we recounted our plans for this great try- 

[ 16] 



ing out of the speed and endurance of our motor 
car. He asked us : 

" Have you ever been in Cuba ? " and, upon our 
negative reply: 

" Do you really think you can drive an auto- 
mobile through the interior of Cuba ? " 

We assured him that we could drive one any- 
where, but he merely laughed and sauntered 
away to tell the other passengers what seemed to 
him to be a funny story. Other Cubans talked 
to us. They were all iconoclasts and some of 
them were plain "knockers." At first we were 
insulted and then our peace of mind was de- 
stroyed. Slowly, but surely, we approached the 
truth. Everywhere we turned for a reassuring 
opinion concerning the suppositious highways, 
we got the same answer : 

" There are no roads ; you can't do it." 

They all explained the impossibility of travers- 
ing its valley lands and mountain regions, of 
making even a most laborious way across the 
arroyos, through the bridgeless rivers, over the 
barren stone, and in the wide swamps. There are 
roads on the map. The maps were originally 
made by Spaniards with a greater regard for neat 
drafting than the truth. It is hard to find those 
roads on the earth. Their course occasionally is 
marked by washouts. 

We slept on the information but gained noth- 
ing. This day we had left our cabins early, to 
catch the first morning glimpse of the beautiful 
harbor of Havana. As we looked upon its blue 
shores, under the bluer sky, and felt the charm 

[ 17] 



of early southern morn, it seemed impossible 
that such a most excellent place to come to could 
be without roads leading from one beauty spot 

to another. 

The original Cuban came along with a parting 
slam at our hopes. We were saved from develop- 
ing a streak of yellow by being carried to a close 
view of the sunken " Maine." While our little 
ship was at anchor, waiting for the tender to land 
its passengers, we surveyed that unprecedented 
monument resting in the middle of Havana har- 
bor and our American blood created a stubborn 
desire to conquer Cuba, roads or no roads, if it 
took all the gasoline in the world and all the 
tires in Akron, Ohio. 

We were whisked from dreamland into the 
confusion of the custom-house. Meekly as pos- 
sible, we suffered the high-handed tactics of the 
revenue officers. These new Cuban officials, 
who used to be flunkeys in the household of Spain, 
with their new freedom and their new uniforms, 
are arrogant. Some day,, if he has not already 
done so, an American chap, with more valor than 
discretion, is going to jail for hitting one of them. 
It is a land of manana, these being the head- 
quarters. You can do anything to-morrow. All 
you can do to-day is to fume and go up to the 
Prado, where there is a good street eating store, 
and get acquainted with cafe con leche. Every 
addition to our list of Cuban acquaintances added 
further proof of the impassability of the Cuban 
interior. It is easy to be bold before the battle. 
We felt as bold as Moro Castle looked across 



[ 18] 



the bay, when we drove around the beautiful 
shore drive toward Camp Columbia and for a 
wild, hilarious rush out on the wonderful San 
Cristobal road. We rushed back again to Havana 
because we were eager to tackle the impossible. 
Two native sugar planters, who had grown 
white haired in middle Cuba, were introduced to 
us at the Hotel Pasaje, as conclusive evidence 
that we were venturing on a dangerous and 
incredible journey. We listened to them while 
we changed our northern garb for clothes more 
suitable to the task ahead of us. At the local 
garage, we engaged an interpreter, commonly 
known as "Cuba." He had had some experience 
as a chauffeur and was the only person we could 
find who seemed to think there might be a chance 
of getting beyond the eastern limits of the city. 
The proprietor of the garage cheerfully assured 
us that we would never reach Matanzas. 
So we left Havana. 

Driving on the boulevard which sweeps around 
the harbor, it was incredible that the ending 
should be a great desert of broken rock. We 
did not speculate on the future, but were satisfied 
to rush over the undulating macadam, rolling up 
an immense funnel of white dust which spread 
clear to the tops of the regal palms along the 
roadside. 

Our future was hidden by the hills in front of 
us. We did not care. It was enough, just to 
dash at racing speed past little scarlet Edens 
among the bright flambollan flowers, where the 
silver-tongued moscareta warbled his southern 

[19] 



song behind the leaves of the spreading laurel and 
the merry tomequin answered from the majestic 
ceiba. It was enough, just to fly past palm- 
thatched huts and wave at the insular urchins 
who, partly curious and partly fearful, were half- 
hidden in the doorways. It was enough, just to 
watch the little speck on the far hillside become 
a bold, commanding block-house as we raced 
toward it. Block-houses are still popular in 
Cuba. One meets up with a block-house on 
almost any hillside, whether or not there is any 
apparent habitation in the region. 

A few miles and it all ended. The boulevard 
became merely a long stretch of rough white 
stones — a new generation of road in the making — 
level and almost straight, but with no surface 
over the jagged rocks and no bridges over the 
many streams. So we drove, part of the time 
over the rocks and part of the time in the rut- 
worn gully below. It was hard going, but not 
impossible. Anyway, it did not last long because 
this particular road ceased entirely. We were m 
the middle of Cuba. 

A mere path straggled over and among the 
hills and was lost in the great patches of native 
rock. We began to take the country seriously. 
Trepidation mingled with curiosity. Once in a 
while a good sort of winding dirt road gave 
promise of speed, only to change, like a dissolv- 
ing lantern slide, to a staggering trail over the 
rocks or between them. The stones increased in 
number and in size. Each occasional break in 
the bumping, swaying, swinging, car-racking, 

[20] 



tire-tearing progress became shorter. We forgot 
the stately palms, the queer huts, and the beauti- 
ful red flowers. We did not even hear the even- 
ing song of the many birds. 

Everywhere was stone. Even the rough fields 
were so littered with loose rock that cultivation 
had not been tried. Each mile was gained by 
defiant effort. We began to worry over the fact 
that, not only were the prophets vindicated, but 
their prophecies had foretold worse conditions 
the farther we went eastward. We thumped 
along to a deep valley from whose bottom the 
sun had already fled and on whose far side a great 
bluff of solid rock arose to dispute our way. 

Night does not settle in Cuba as it does in New 
England. It snaps, or, rather, day snaps into 
night. Twilight is not long enough to deserve 
the name. The task of getting to the opposite 
crown of the valley was too great for the few 
minutes of remaining daylight; so we camped. 
We were not prepared for camping, because we 
had anticipated spending our nights in villages 
or towns. We had learned a lot that afternoon 
and were still growing in wisdom. We made 
particular note of the point that when one is 
traveling through that country in a motor car 
his night stop is invariably just exactly where he 
happens to be when the sun sets. 

That was a wonderful night. It was dark when 
three of us, including the interpreter, struck into 
the region of awesome shadows and shivering 
noises, seeking habitation and food. We could 
see nothing. We simply wandered and yelled 

[23] 



to attract attention. Every time we sent a loud 
"que hay" reverberating among the hills, we 
jumped at our own temerity. At last a hound 
bayed in answer and a feeble light flickered far 
off, up in the sky. We trudged up another hill 
toward it. 

A gaunt, scraggy Cuban met us. We watched 
his long machete with fascinated eyes, while the 
loquacious " Cuba " gave him a detailed account of 
ourselves, in Spanish. The Cuban welcomed us 
to his home, a hut of palm slabs roofed with thatch 
and floored with dirt. By the sinister rays of a 
small oil torch, mother and children ate a meal 
of pottage. The children cried and we gave them 
a few Spanish coins. Charity is cheap in a country 
of depreciated silver. 

We asked for water, and it was drawn from a 
pigskin. We asked for food, and were told that 
on the next hill-top dwelt a Great Seiior — one 
Govin, owner of the big newspaper in Havana 
and who could speak English. We matched coins 
to see who would venture back alone to the 
somewhat distant camp with a bucket of water. 
Crebbin lost and trundled off into the darkness, 
seeking the light of the bonfire, which furnished 
our only clue to the whereabouts of headquarters. 

Under the talkative guidance of our still won- 
der-struck Cuban friend, we found the other house. 
The owner was brought out of bed to hear our 
reason for being there. He was much interested 
and much surprised. He was glad to give us 
food but he refused to be in a hurry. Also Sefiora, 
before she started to the kitchen to get us guinea 

[24] 



hen and yams, insisted that the strange tale be 
repeated to her. 

The house of Govin was high above the sur- 
rounding country, but there was nothing to see 
in the darkness and nothing to he,ar except the 
barking of dogs and the echoing sounds from 
distant woods. 

Across the front of the low, board house ran a 
long porch. So closely framed it was in shrub- 
bery, and so dense was the night packed around 
it, that there was almost the privacy of a room. 
The master, in his half-attire of white linen, 
kept up a running fire of conversation, partly in 
Spanish through and to the interpreter, and 
partly in English. Highly interested, but, for 
the most part, quiet, were the several laborers 
who shared the hospitality of the porch. Occa- 
sionally they interjected rapid exclamations and 
questions in Spanish. It was hard to concen- 
trate upon Senor Govin and our conversation. 

The curiousness of the situation had unraveled 
my nerves. Never before had it seemed possible 
that a person could be so comparatively close to 
accustomed things and yet be so isolated. The 
whole scheme was like a bunch of dramatics 
grabbed from a play or torn from a copyrighted 
novel. Persons who are not used to prowling 
about the back yards and blind alleys of the 
world find it hard to adjust themselves to strange 
society, except in the broad light of day. 

Probably the two at the roadside camp a mile 
away, and the one struggling along the hilly 
trail with a bucketful of water, felt the impres- 
ts ] 



siveness of the night as much, or more, than we 
who sat on the Govin porch and talked with the 
Govin family. 

It was a romantic situation until Govin, inno- 
cently desiring to please, cracked the grandeur 
of the night and pierced the helpless heavens by 
turning on the rusty voice of a battered ten-dollar 
phonograph. 

Finally, we ate our delayed supper at our own 
fireside. We were not yet sleepy. The food and 
warmth cheered us, for although the days be hot 
in Cuba, the nights are cold. Twenty-four hours 
had not acclimated us to a change of fifty degrees 
in the temperature with the setting of the sun. 
Then began our vigil. 

Thirty miles back of us lay Havana with its 
gay opera, its bright cafes, and its dirty hotels, 
swarming with tourists. Thirty miles back lay 
a world's city, known to the world, close to the 
rest of the world, and familiar to the world as 
any other capital. Thirty miles back lay our 
expectations, our fancies, and our nerve. Thirty 
miles back lay the things we knew. This was 
unknown wilderness. 

Havana to Camp Solitude — thirty miles. 



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CHAPTER II 

Your isle, which stands 
As Neptune's, ribbed and paled in with rocks unscalable. 

— Cymbeline. 

ECOND-HAND 
breakfasts, made from 
the ruins of supper, 
are never pleasant. It 
is less pleasant to meet 
the cold, damp, gray 
dawn without even the satisfaction 
of awakening from sleep. Our 
second morning in Cuba, — we 
stolidly watched the dark sky turn 
into tawny streaks and gradually 
brighten into daylight. We ate a few crackers 
and gnawed at a few left-over guinea hen bones, 
with tea, brewed in a tin cup, for a chaser. We 
were impatient for the sun to drive the chill out 
of the morning and out of our bones. 

Now we faced the toughest proposition we ever 
had met; so we dodged it. Easier than trying 
to climb the bluffs that blocked the way was a 
circuitous route over the top of a wind-blown, 
grass-covered hill in somebody's field. We broke 

[29] 



down the stone fence, drove the car through, and 
dashed over these fields, skipping from one hill 
to another. At last we brought up at the back 
door of the house of Govin. He gave us advice 
and bananas, both of which we swallowed as fast 
as we could. 

Bananas in Cuba are fine ; advice is poor. We 
were in the center of a magnificent panorama of 
hills, very green, and fringed with palms that 
reached the horizon and seemed to be everlasting. 
Seiior Govin had selected his home well. It was 
a beautiful and wonderful country. Also, it was 
the third of January and the now scorching sun 
had warmed us to the continuance of our fight 
against the rocks. Courage had returned and 
we were willing to accept whatever Cuba had to 
offer in the way of highway difficulties. 

What happened the day before we forgot. 
There is no time to remember, when journeying 
as we journeyed. The new difficulties are so 
rapidly encountered that each experience wipes 
out the recollection of the previous one. With 
a good-bye from Senor and a smiling adios from 
Seiiora, we ran down a long, clay-covered lane to 
the stone-floored valley, which was the only road 
there was to follow. That day we took the 
measure of our ability to strike the first two 
letters off the word impossible. 

We discovered a new kind of hill — a hill like 
a natural stairway of great, rough limestone 
steps. It was steep enough to be an almost im- 
possible climb, even had it been smooth. At the 
left was a deep gorge on whose bottom wound 

[ 30] 



the rusty rails of the Havana Central. On the 
right was a plowed field, crossed by gullies and 
covered with stones. 

Stones, by the way, do not affect agriculture. 
The soil grows its crop whether cleared of stones 
or not. They hitch a squad of bulls onto a plow 
and literally rip up the face of the earth. Then 
they plant sugar cane. After a while they come 
around with machetes and cut it down. Next 
they load it, in half-ton bunches, on ox carts and 
haul it to the mill. If the roads become worse, 
by the deepening of the immense ruts, they put 
on higher wheels and more oxen. 

The clearance of an ox cart is thirty-eight to 
forty-eight inches. When it is wet the carts sink 
into the earth up to the hubs. They travel in 
groups, so that when an extremely bad place is 
reached, the oxen from several carts may be 
hitched onto each cart in succession. It takes 
from four to twelve oxen to pull an ordinary cart. 

We surveyed that particular hill from all an- 
gles, reconnoitering the railway track, the fields, 
and the hill itself. A native, who happened 
along, showed us how to cut off the tail of a 
scorpion with a machete so that he becomes a 
safe companion. There are scorpions under most 
of the rocks and there are lots of rocks. Centi- 
pedes are correspondingly numerous. We climbed 
the hill itself, filling the jutting surfaces of the 
step-like rocks with loose stones and, then, driving 
up the rough, perilous incline by sheer power. 

Next we found that getting down the opposite 
side of some of these stepped hills was likely to 

[33] 



be harder than getting up. They are so steep 
that the car slides with the wheels locked. Once 
we had to fasten a rope to the rear end of the car, 
give it a couple of turns around a palm tree and 
let the car go bumping down, a yard at a time. 
At one place we were lucky enough to find a 
couple of planks which had been used to bridge 
a shallow creek, so we drove down the hill by 
using the planks for skids from one step to the 
next. 

Our first ford was a wide, shallow stream with a 
hard rock bed. Through the clear rippling water 
of this first river the car shot with a great splurge 
and spreading of white spray. We had dreaded 
the rivers which had been pictured to us as im- 
passable. By this stream was a country grocery, 
in front of which lounged a rural guard. We 
asked him if this was a typical river. He laughed 
and started to tell us about deep torrents that 
flowed over beds of stone, between wall-like cliffs. 
We changed the subject and dickered with him 
for his machete, with which he claimed to have 
killed seven Spaniards during the last war. 

Rural guards are near soldiers. They get more 
money than United States regulars and wear 
better clothes, with celluloid collars that are wiped 
clean every day. They carry machetes and 
revolvers. They will sell either or both. They 
ride good ponies and go to country dances. 
They are not impressive. 

The route continued an interesting one. There 
are more kinds of trail in a half day's journey in 
Cuba than there is in going from Hell's Gate to 

[34] 



the Golden Gate. A comparatively level stretch 
of red dirt, strewn with boulders, suddenly leaves 
off in a tract of grass where the route is marked 
only by stone fences. Where the red soil is hard, 
the travel is not extremely difficult, the principal 
obstruction being loose stones, which must be 
dodged. The same dirt, soaked up by a heavy 
rain, becomes a bottomless mire. In some places 
there is nothing to follow but a path through 
high-growing sugar cane. In other places, un- 
less the ground is seamed with deep ruts by the 
continuous travel of heavy ox carts in wet 
weather, the only thing which signifies a traveled 
path will be the country stores. Some of these 
are in board houses. Most of them are merely 
thatched huts. They all keep a little supply of 
vile liquors and canned meats. At some of them 
it is possible to buy oranges and bananas. 

During those scorching days, with infrequent 
opportunities to get good drinking water, we 
quenched our thirst with the juice of many 
oranges. They are little ones, but cheap and 
good. We bought them by the dozen and threw 
them loosely into the folded top, back of the 
tonneau. Bananas we ate immediately upon 
purchase. The tree-ripened bananas of Cuba 
are very thin skinned and delicious, but one hour 
in the sun spoils them. 

Our second morning's work, to relate, would 
appear to be the tale of a long journey. As a 
matter of fact, we laboriously worked our way 
over the rocks for a few miles to Jaruca, where 
we stopped for lunch. Jaruca was our first 

[37] 



interior village. We had passed no towns since 
leaving Havana. We got our initial experience 
of a typical inland meal and started in learning 
to like the peculiar style of cooking which is 
partly Spanish, partly devilish, and ninety-five 
per cent, grease. 

The main thing to eat is a pottage of beans 
and meat, fried bananas and chicken or guinea, 
cooked with rice. In the large towns or in places 
near the rivers or along the coast, there is always 
fish. The bread is good everywhere. It comes 
in small individual loaves and is so greatly 
" shortened " that it needs no butter, which is a 
good thing. There is no butter, except the 
canned stuff shipped in from the United States. 
This is impossible. It looks like melted vaseline. 
We did not taste it. 

At Jaruca, the whole town joined us at 
luncheon. Only those who had been to Havana 
had seen an automobile and some of them had 
never heard of one. They were all timid. In 
addition to which, we were Americans. The 
interior Cubans have a very sensible respect fol- 
ios Americanos. They are frank in their inspec- 
tion of a stranger. At the cafe, where we sat at 
a corner table almost on the sidewalk, we were 
surrounded by the closely packed populace, that 
carefully examined our make-up, from toes to 
turbans, and discussed us in Spanish. Those who 
did not stick by us during the meal clustered 
about the car. Hunger is a preventive of 
embarrassment. Besides, we broke even with 
the town by scaring it out of its wits with an 

[38] 



exhibition of fast and fancy driving on the way 
to the edge of the village. 

That afternoon we made good use of our 
hatchet. Many times there would be several 
drops, or great depressions, in the rock and at 
each place we would have to cut down underbrush 
alongside the path that we might get around the 
hole. Much of the driving was in deep trenches 
where the travel of many ox carts had worn the 
ruts into a ditch. For hundreds of yards we 
drove between these close walls of dirt, where the 
grass-covered ground, on either side, rose higher 
than the car. This ditch, winding past rows of 
huts in which lived sugar plantation laborers, 
debouched now and then into open territory, 
where the road was any feasible way among the 
shrubs, rocks, palms, and ruts. 

We began to tire under the hard work and 
were glad that the sun was sinking rapidly 
toward the line of hills back of us. We hoped 
to reach suitable shelter before dark, for we 
needed a night of real sleep. We struck the first 
river of consequence, and one of us waded 
through it to find out where and how we might 
cross. It was not difficult, but this was not the 
region of rivers. We had yet to cross the ones 
of which we had been warned. 

Rivers down there are both a blessing and a 
curse. They stop traffic and they stop thirst. 
There are but few wells. We struck one artesian 
well which supplied water for many square 
leagues. A league, incidentally, has its own 
meaning, being a colloquial measure of about a 

[ 39 1 



mile and a half, instead of the usual three miles 
implied by the marine kind. Most of the drinking 
water comes from the rivers. It is carried away 
in cans or water jars. The former are principally 
five-gallon kerosene cans saved for the purpose. 
It is not very good water and, unless obtained at 
a store, is given one to drink from a porron. 

A porron is a Spanish-made clay bottle with an 
opening at the top, through which to fill it, and 
a small nozzle on one side, through which to 
empty it. The use of the porron is the only 
visible evidence of cleanliness on the island. It 
is against all etiquette and many rules to touch 
the spout to the lips. You simply aim as well as 
you can and hit your mouth as often as you can. 

We ended our journey at Benavides. Bena- 
vides is a dot on the map. In reality, it is a 
board hut, yclept grocery. We had fought our 
way thirty-four miles. Hungrily impatient, we 
waited in the stone-flagged main room of the 
house for a much-fried supper. We ate it by the 
glimmer of a side lamp. Around the dirty table 
at which we sat, collected all the inhabitants of 
the house, and a dozen others who must have 
lived somewhere but who appeared and dis- 
appeared in a mysteriously dramatic fashion. 

It was a dismal meal and a poor one and we 
were cross. We were glad to creep onto the wire 
spring cots which they spread for us in a partially 
enclosed corner of the hut. That night we 
accrued some more wisdom about touring in Cuba. 
We undressed, for we had not yet learned our 
part, but that was the last time we were so foolish, 

[40] 



except one joyous night when we put up at a 
regular hotel in the real city of Santa Clara. 

Each of us had, underneath, a wire mattress, 
and, on top, a starched sheet. Cold air rushed 
through the meshes of the woven wire, for the 
night was a chill one, while the starched sheet 
felt like the dank sides of a sepulchre. Outside, 
innumerable pigs grunted between the several 
acts of a protracted dog fight, and the chickens, 
which roosted in the house, fluttered from one 
corner of the room to another; the many fleas 
were still bolder. 

There is an intimacy about living things in 
Cuba which is somewhat appalling to a man who 
has been more or less used to picking his 
associates, or, at least, his family. Cats, dogs, 
chickens, and pigs are welcome in the household. 
The children sit on the floor and quarrel with 
each other and with the dogs. It is not infrequent 
to find a hut which has its household snake. 
There are no poisonous snakes on the Isle de Cuba, 
but there is a large brand which looks as if it 
would like to be poisonous if it knew how. Just 
as the family dog, in Illinois, protects the house 
against burglars, so the family snake in Santa 
Clara Province protects the house against rats — 
but this is not a tale of grewsome things. 

Each successive night had its elements of 
humor, but that night at Benavides we had not 
yet arisen to the greatness of mind and broadness 
of character which permitted us to enjoy the 
humorous phases of the evening. We rolled 
around on our cots to change the water marks 

[41] 



which the wire mattress made in our skin, and 
tried to sleep during the brief intervals between 
occasions when it was necessary to awake and pull 
the sheets back onto us. If all of the other 
fellows had the same shrinkage of the soul which 
I experienced that night (and, out of fairness to 
myself, I think they did ), the expedition came, 
awfully close to needing an epitaph. 

Camp Solitude to Benavides — thirty-four miles. 



[42] 




CHAPTER III 

The high palme-trees, with braunches /aire, 
Out of the lowly vallies did arise, 
And high shoote up their heads into the skyes. 

— Spenser. 

EA THEN who wor- 
ship the sun are not 
such bad philoso- 
phers, after all. For 
the second time we 
learned that the 
bright sun changes 
the circumstances ; 
so we resolved to make our pluck 
last from sunrise to sunrise, in- 
stead of from sunrise to sunset. 
We were sanguine travelers who set out from 
Benavides to Matanzas, over a fairly good yellow 
clay road which lasted only about one-third of 
the nine miles to Cuba's show town at the head 
of the Yumuri Valley. We gayly bid good 
morning to the familiar rocks. 

Crossing them was not as hard work as it had 
been the first day. Places which had puzzled 
and almost stumped us, we crossed with Icarian 

[45] 




abandon. Waldon, at the steering wheel, had 
learned new tricks of acrobatic motoring and all 
of us had developed unexpected ingenuity in 
makeshift road engineering. We did not waste 
any time in rolling away the wrong rock or any 
other rock than the one whose removal was 
absolutely necessary to make progress possible. 
We had developed a system of team work and 
were able to go over these patches of rock at four 
or five miles an hour where, previously, we had 
been able to make only two or three. 

Coming to a place where there was a new road 
under construction, but not far enough under to 
be used for motoring, we encountered the con- 
tractor in charge of the grading. He was an 
English-speaking Cuban, who had served time in 
the United States, and was greatly amazed at our 
approach. The only way we could convince him 
that we had driven from Havana was by pointing 
out that we could not have come from any other 
place. He seemed to like us and so gave us all 
the information he had concerning the impossi- 
bility of going any farther than Matanzas. 

Every first-class city in Cuba has a road. It 
does not straggle out of town. It darts straight 
into the country as though it intended to cross the 
island. After a couple of miles it stops, as if the 
money had run out, the mayor had died, or some 
other calamity had occasioned its sudden ending. 
About six inches past the edge of the macadam 
there is likely to be a deep morass, a bed of rocks 
that look as though they had been thrown there 
from a volcano, or a great confusion of bottomless 

[46] 



ruts. There is no such thing as a compromise 
between the good and the bad. It is either one 
or the other. We struck the good about the time 
we came within sight of the cathedral towers of 
Matanzas. 

It was quite a novelty to drive fast over the 
smooth macadam. We had almost forgotten that 
we ever had been in any other country or that 
we ever had driven an automobile fast enough to 
roll up dust. Passing a beautiful cemetery with 
a magnificent wall and gateway, the interpreter 
explained that it was possible for a Cuban town 
to maintain a beautiful cemetery because it leases 
the lots instead of selling them, and the income 
from the dead is fairly permanent. Edwin made 
a real joke, by asking what they did with the 
dead beats who did not pay the rent. 

An astonished rural guard, on the outskirts of 
Matanzas, was glad to drop his duties and accom- 
pany us in the car to the center of town. He 
guided us to the Grand Hotel Paris. That word 
" grand, " as applied to the Cuban hotels, is a great 
deal like the word "best," as applied to auto- 
mobiles in American advertising. There are so 
many Grand Hotels at which one would not stop, 
except out of necessity, that the word has lost its 
meaning. This one, however, was fairly deserving 
of the title and we were immediately charmed 
with the clerk. 

Rogelio Gaarken was his name, and he was the 
first Cuban we had met who did more thinking 
than jabbering. "Cuba," our original inter- 
preter, was to go back to Havana from here, so 

[47] 



we shanghaied Rogelio, much to the disgust of 
the proprietor, because this was the tourist season 
and Rogelio was needed to bring down Havana's 
overflow of sightseers at eleven dollars per, 
guide to the Yumuri Valley and dinner, with a 
thirty-cent bottle of wine, thrown in. 

It was nine o'clock when we reached Matanzas 
and two o'clock when we left. The visiting fever 
had struck us and we loitered away the hours 
seeing some of the most convenient sights and 
adding to our stingy supplies. We put in some 
groceries and road building hardware, including 
a mattock. 

A mattock is worth two dollars in Spanish 
money, but in usefulness it is worth twelve shovels, 
six crowbars and three hatchets. The pick end 
is the best mechanical substitute for dynamite, 
while the wide blade on the other side can be 
used for anything from chopping out shale and 
rock-like clay to peeling sugar cane for luncheon. 
We also purchased as much gasoline as we could 
carry, for Matanzas is the only place in Cuba 
where it is refined. Gasoline is an uncertain 
quantity down there. We had got beyond being 
critical about the uncertainty of its quality. The 
smallest town has kerosene and some of the 
country stores carry benzine. Gasoline is only 
found in the larger cities, where the mayor or 
some other dignitary owns a gasoline stove. 

The government engineer of the Province of 
Matanzas gave us a blue print showing the way 
we should go toward Santa Clara. After he had 
finished his elaborate directions, he told us that 

[48 1 



it would be impossible to travel that road. He 
said that we might go a little way but would 
soon come to a river fifteen to twenty feet deep 
and a hundred yards wide. Our only comment 
was: 

"Adios." 

Jagged rocks had made our tires suffer and we 
were not well supplied with extras. "Cuba," 
returning to Havana, carried word to the garage 
there to ship new tires to us at Santa Clara. As 
we followed the blue print out of town, our con- 
versation dwelt on the river. 

Slowly and laboriously picking our way toward 
the wide, deep gorge in which the dreaded stream 
itself was hidden, we schemed out a lot of things 
that would have been a credit to Robinson Crusoe 
and other noted performers of bogus engineering 
feats. Our favorite plan was an immense raft of 
palm trunks, it being agreed that, if we worked 
all night, we could probably get the raft ready 
to float by morning. 

We came upon the river unexpectedly, our first 
intimation of its whereabouts being three bare 
piers sticking above the bluff and telling of the 
destructive march of Weyler through a province 
that once had boasted a few century-old bridges. 
Then we saw the river. It was as dry as the top 
of a hill, a fair sample of the many valleys floored 
with nothing but rocks of volcanic roughness. 
It was marvelous that the tires were not literally 
torn from the rims and that the twisted wheels 
and groaning frame did not weaken under the 
strenuous task. 

[49] 



Having crossed so much rock, we argued that 
surely nothing worse could be ahead. We began 
to gain confidence in ourselves and to lose con- 
fidence in Cuban information. When the govern- 
ment engineer of a province did not know that 
a river a few miles from his office was only full 
of water in the wet season, we concluded that the 
mere prophecies of provincials were not worth 
worrying about. 

Ambling along until nightfall, we often crossed 
fields where it was easier to take a roundabout 
way than to try to follow the trail. Slowly we 
drove under the everlasting palms and among the 
boulders half-hidden in the luxuriant grass. The 
war had bled fast and furiously around here. 
Stone houses of the Spanish period all were gone 
or stood in ruins, dim pages in the history of 
minor battles which never will be written. The 
country had blossomed again. The red flambollan, 
the stately sugar cane, and the fast-growing 
bananas had wiped the stain away, but thatch- 
roofed huts replaced the old Spanish houses which 
once reared picturesquely in wild regions. 

For miles the road would be marked by waver- 
ing stone fences, but there was nothing between 
these fences to show that it had been used since 
the war or that it ever had been anything else 
than the rock-strewn virgin soil. Sometimes the 
grass grew as high as the car. Sometimes the 
fences would be long lines of palms, framing a 
magnificent vista of miles upon miles that ended 
in the blue, blue hills at the horizon. Had there 
been'a road between these fences or between these 

[50] 



palms, Mercury himself could have asked no better 
speedway. 

As the country became flatter, sugar planta- 
tions became larger and more frequent. Now 
and then we would strike the railway, at a sugar 
mill siding or where it passed through some 
village. We scared the whole town of Limonar 
out of the lethargy into which it had sunk since 
the war. Isolated and without excitement save 
local brawls, dances and cock fights, the sudden 
bursting into its midst of a motor car, manned 
by Americans, was like the bursting of the first 
bomb of another war. Having stopped to buy 
oranges, the inhabitants — men, women, debu- 
tantes in sheath gowns of the original pattern, and 
little children — chased us as far as they could 
hold the pace. This was easy until we found a 
fairly level field and drove out into the loneliness 
of vast country where there is nothing except the 
rapid growth of wild plants and grasses. 

Recklessly we drove through deep grass, among 
the burned houses and ruined fences, always 
reminding us of the fact that we were probably 
the first to follow across these provinces in wake 
of the devastating armies of a decade past. Hid- 
den in the grass were ruts that had been cut by 
heavily loaded ox carts years before and which 
had hardened almost like rock. 

Eventually we arrived at Tosca, a handful of 
huts set in a bleak region of grass, where there 
were not even palm trees to hide poverty and 
desolation. We had ceased to ask if we might 
stay. We simply announced ourselves and took 

[51] 



what we could get. Here, it was a supper of our 
own canned stuff, purchased at Matanzas; eggs 
which we bought of one of the farmers at a dollar 
a dozen, and bread furnished by the hospitable 
family which had nothing else to offer, except the 
use of their living room. We ate by candlelight, 
under the curious gaze of astounded farmers, 
timid women, and the frightened glances of little 
babies, who sat on the floor and sucked sugar 
cane. 

Every time we gathered, in the evening, 
around some Cuban farm-house table, we were 
impressed by the fact that our trip had two dis- 
tinct parts and was, in reality, two distinct 
journeys. One was a journey by day, over a 
hard and trying land. The other was a journey 
by night, into many peculiar places. By day, 
we worked and studied the country. At night, 
we loitered and studied the people. Each day 
was complete in itself. We never paid attention 
to what had passed or to what might come. 
Perhaps, because we were tired, generally, it was 
easier than thinking, speculating, or planning, 
just to sit among the Cubans and be interested 
in them. Little things were mutually amusing. 

The fact that we brewed tea in huge cups and 
drank it in huge, hot gulps amused the Cubans. 
Courteously and gladly, they heated water and, 
then, laughed to see us pour it on the little green 
leaves. On the other hand, we were amused by 
the universal presence of sewing machines. The 
smaller and meaner the hut, the more promi- 
nently loomed the sewing machine. The real 

[52] 



Cuban lives in almost squalor ; dresses in almost 
rags. The squalor is accented by the sewing 
machine. Ragged pants are sewed together and 
patched, likewise. 

The Cuban has a few passions. He gratifies 
these and does not give a rap for anything else. 
The sewing machine is evidently one of the 
national passions — carefully cultivated by the 
enterprising foreign department of the sewing 
machine trust. But the greatest of Cuban pas- 
sions is gambling. The lid is on bull-fighting 
and cock-fighting in Cuba. It is a leaky lid. 
When Saturday night comes, the ragged Cuban 
goes to a dirty corner in his dirty hut, raises a 
dirty board and brings out a dirty bag, in which 
are many dirty Spanish dollars. He places the 
bag carefully under one arm and under the 
other, still more carefully, he places his favorite 
little black rooster and starts off for the nearest 
cock pit. Money is merely a medium of wager. 

Our daily march was improving. We had 
gone forty-four miles. 

That evening we spent rearranging our supplies 
and tools in the tousled tonneau. Whatever we 
had that was not necessary we threw away, and 
placed our road implements where they would 
rattle the least, knock our shins the least, and yet 
be ready for instant use. Then we raised the 
top and entertained each other with merry persi- 
flage, until we were sleepy enough to lay down 
in our clothes on benches within the hut and 
forget it. 

Sleep was our greatest need. Shivering through 

[53 ] 



long wakeful hours of another night spent in our 
clothes, on hard boards, attacked by fleas, and 
awakened by the clamor of yawling dogs and 
puling chickens, we found a tonic in Rogelio, 
whom we called " Roe. " He was an excellent type 
of that dark-hued,wiry Cuban, whose well-chiseled 
features and wonderful black eyes are far superior 
to the alleged beauty of the Cuban woman. Some 
of the mahogany-tinted country women have such 
eyes, but never the senorita of the town. The 
latter is, in most cases, simply a human synonym 
for talcum powder. I would like to corner the 
powder market in Cuba. 

Rogelio was quaint, as well as handsome. 
Some ancestor had been a humorist and a philos- 
opher. Rogelio became one of us. He made it 
easier for us to look up at the dark, thatched roof 
and to fill our sleepless moments with laughter 
instead of commiseration. 

Benavides to Tosca — forty-four miles. 



[54 ] 




CHAPTER IV 

Magnum iter adscendo ; sed dat mihi gloria vires. 

— Propertius. 







ALL ruts, except those 
^"^^ made by ox carts, 



are merely imita- 
tions. The country 
through which we 
were passing soaks 
water like a sponge 
in the wet season. 
It dries quickly. 
When the red soil is soft, the 
immense, heavily-laden carts 
sink into and cut gashes three 
or four feet deep in the face of the earth. These 
parallel, intersect, and cross one another. There 
is only one way to drive a car over them ; that 
is to always keep the wheels on the high spots. 
Sometimes the high spot may be wide; some- 
times narrow as the wheel ; sometimes it may be 
the sloping side of a gully. On these ruts and 
on the rocks we tore tires off the wheels at two 
miles an hour. 

From Tosca to Macagua is sixty miles of ruts. 

[57] 



As we left the region where the road is over bare 
rock, we began to work into a region where the 
ruts alternate with mud. For a short distance 
the ground had been untraversed for a long time, 
and was hard and fairly smooth. We enjoyed 
the rare experience of " beating it," which down 
there meant eighteen to twenty miles an hour. 
This respite from the usual difficulties was brief, 
for the road finally became merely an opening 
between sugar fields. 

The cane, sweeping the car on either side, rose 
far above our heads and for many miles it was 
never possible to see in front of us farther than a 
few hundred yards. Leaving the sugar cane for 
short drives over open ground, we noticed that 
this must have been a particularly patriotic sec- 
tion during the fighting with Spain. Most of the 
scattered houses were of stone or boards, calci- 
mined white, light blue, or yellow, and nearly 
each one bore the roughly painted sign : " Viva 
Cuba Libre." 

Lunch was eaten in a street cafe at Colon, 
and while there we became acquainted with 
the four-hundred of a typical inland city. 
Politicians in such localities bear reputable 
names socially and lead the village society. We 
needed gasoline and were told that there was a 
private supply owned by a man who was then at 
the home of the mayor, on the outskirts, where 
the beaux and belles of Colon had been invited 
to a dinner party by his honor. We were asked 
to join the festivities, but excused ourselves and 
took the oil monopolist back to the town that 

[58] 



he might sell us one of his precious ten-gallon 
cans of gasoline. 

The people of the farms that we had met had 
been picturesque and interesting. The social 
leaders of this small city were very ordinary types 
in their commonplace imitation of American 
dressing. They are uninteresting anomalies, 
striving for a conventionality of which they 
know little. They have a color line which does 
not exist in the country. Out among the hills, 
the only line of demarkation is the age limit 
above which it is considered proper and right that 
little boys and little girls should wear clothes. 

We were now running comparatively near the 
railway and small stations were frequent. To 
most of these, mahogany was being brought up 
from the forests of the south, one immense log 
at a time being hauled on a cart drawn by from 
four to a dozen oxen. The progress is about two 
miles an hour when the road is not muddy. 

More ruts, open fields covered with loose rocks, 
mud holes and, then, Macagua, a town to remem- 
ber. It boasted an hotel, which was club, general 
store, saloon and salon to the village and sur- 
rounding country. We had beds for the first 
time in Cuba, but our real experience that even- 
ing was not in them. Being Sunday, it was a 
day of celebration. 

There had been a baseball game in which the 
Pinks beat the Blues. Cuba is baseball crazy. 
Each country team has dainty cotton-flannel 
suits, which they put on after the game for the 
purpose of parading around the town. There 

[59] 



was a balloon ascension at dusk — a hot-air balloon 
of red, white, and blue paper going up in flames. 
The star number on the program was the evening 
dance. The orchestra, composed of the blackest 
of Cuban negroes, came early with its kettle 
drums, cornet, clarinet, gourd and trombone. 
The tunes were of local invention. A file drawn 
across the teeth gives the same sensation as the 
rasping noise they made. 

Local society took possession of the hotel floor. 
They danced a slow, sleepy, never-ceasing, never- 
changing two-step. The black rabble stood out- 
side, watching the scene through open doors and 
windows. When each dance was done, the couples 
marched around in an endless parade. Then the 
young swains exchanged partners or managed to 
select the maidens of their respective hearts' 
desire. If a young man wanted a certain girl, he 
grabbed her partner by the unengaged arm, made 
a few farcical bows, which the grabbed party 
would duplicate and then withdraw, it being con- 
sidered highly improper to protest the transfer. 
By the way of an extra for the edification of the 
entire party, the American embassy rang in a 
cake walk. 

Our beds were on the balcony which surrounded 
the second floor of the hotel building. We slept 
as men will who have not slept in four days. 

Tosca to Macagua — sixty miles. 



[60] 




CHAPTER V 



* * * for now began 
Night with her sullen wings to double-shade the desert. 

— Milton. 



"- 




■ > Y its very monot- 
.rJT~^ ony, human nature 
is disappointing. 
Interior Cubans are 
guileless, frank, generous, 
meek, dirty, willing, and 
altogether submissive and 
obedient. In other words, 
they are children. But a com- 
munity like Macagua has its 
four-flushers, its liars, and its 
cheats, the same as London, New York, and 
Oshkosh. There had been at the dance a man 
who said he lived some distance eastward, knew 
every foot of the country and, on returning to his 
farm in the morning, would be glad to show us 
the difficultly followed trail. We took him along. 
It was very early in the morning and the sun 
was straight ahead, shining into our eyes over 
the low mist which had not yet been dispelled. 
We ran right from town into a great fen, where 

[63] 



only a few stunted palm trees rose above the vast 
ocean of rank guinea grass, covering invisible 
mires. We could not see the wet places until 
we ran into them. Trying to get around a deep 
mud hole, we bumped into a palm tree and had 
to cut it down. 

Chopping a palm tree is like chopping steel 
tubing. A hundred glancing blows of machete, 
mattock and axe leave a few scratches on the 
trunk of the tree. It was while we were hack- 
ing away at this palm that our volunteer guide 
informed us that we were lost. There is no 
definite road through the tall grass which hides 
the treacherous swamps. The sun is the best 
guide. We began to wish for the rocks that we 
had struggled over, back in Matanzas Province. 
Our displeasure we vented on the unfortunate 
fraud who had invented his guide story to obtain 
a ride in the wonderful automobile from the 
United States. We were even disappointed that 
he did not mind being left anywhere to walk 
back. Provincial Cubans do not travel far from 
home, ever, but they will wander in any direction 
with you and worry not at all about going back. 
The lack of palatable food is about the same in 
one place as another, and the hut of one Cuban 
is about as homelike as that of another, so they 
are seemingly indifferent to time or place. 

Sighting the railway, we decided to quit trying 
to follow the hidden trail through the swamp and 
take to the right-of-way. Imagine running along 
the worst railway roadbed of which you can think, 
just inside the fence, regardless of grades, banks, 

[64] 



or ravines. Imagine such a stretch of road 
covered thick and deep with grass. For several 
leagues this is what we had, until we struck a 
high plateau where there was no habitation and 
no road — only palm trees, by the thousands, and, 
scattered among them, small ponds made by 
heavy rainfall. 

The grass was short. The sun scorched and 
there was nothing to drink. We had forgotten 
to lay in our usual supply of oranges. We 
wandered about, guided by the sun and trying to 
keep to the correct general direction. Palm trees 
are not close together like the trees of a northern 
forest, but at a certain distance their white trunks 
bank into a solid wall. Always, it seemed, we 
were in the middle of a large, white-paled arena. 
Here, also, Rogelio pointed out to us the flat- 
topped guao tree, which is dreaded by the natives 
because of the popular belief that to rest in its 
shadow means sleep and death. 

After awhile we hit a sandy trail which had 
been the bed of some long since dried-out river. 
It was seamed in a thousand directions by the 
draining off of recent rains. We welcomed the 
approach of the first person we had met since 
morning, a horse-back rider who appeared to be 
honestly familiar with the country and who led us, 
once more, to the trail we had lost. We encount- 
ered more tall grass. To a spectator, the car must 
have looked like some big, black beast, wallowing 
along in boundless marsh. 

A deep blue ridge in the east betokened moun- 
tains. We were in a valley. That afternoon 

[65] 



we forded nine shallow rivers and rushed in- 
numerable short steep climbs up their farther 
banks. Some of these grades seemed to stand 
the car on end, both going down and coming up. 
At many of them we were forced to stop and cut 
out notches in the hard clay or solid rock, to clear 
the fly wheel, when the car should go up over the 
sharp crown of the hill. 

At a small, isolated grocery store, where we 
stopped for oranges, we learned that we had 
missed San Domingo, our immediate objective 
point, by many miles, and so struck directly east- 
ward for Esperanza. It was discouraging infor- 
mation, for we had not eaten at all that day. 
We were fighting hard and our mettle was 
improving. We had long since dropped the 
habit of anxiety that had shadowed our efforts on 
the first two days. 

We kept on going lower and lower into the 
valley. The valley became muddier and mud- 
dier. We crossed quagmires by the score, some 
of them by following a carefully planned route 
over solid spots. Others we crossed by mak- 
ing a rough causeway of brush and any broken 
trees and limbs which we could find. Still 
others, whose bottoms, by probing with a stick, 
we found to be made of hard rock, we took by 
"shooting" — which means driving full tilt 
straight through the mud and water. "Shoot- 
ing" became a common pastime with us and 
a by-word. At every mire one of us would 
run ahead of the car, size it up or investigate, 
and yell back the directions to "shoot her" or 

[66] 



to get out and help build a floating bridge of 
brush. 

We had crossed several rivers that would have 
been ten to fifteen feet deep with water during 
the rainy season. Even now some of them had 
treacherous bottoms of irregularly piled stone. 
Before fording, it was necessary for one of us to 
wade through to map out a route over the high 
places along which the car might be safely driven 
through the water. We did not stop for a meal 
at Esperanza, because the daylight was going 
away from Santa Clara faster than we were going 
towards it and we wished to spend the night 
there. We had not yet driven after dark, but 
to-night it seemed that either we would have to 
do so or camp in a seemingly uninhabited tract 
of marshy land. 

The low clouds in the west, reflecting the 
crimson glory of the sun's farewell glance, spread 
a woven gold mantilla on the naked shoulders of 
a grim, forbidding world, and the motor car sank, 
helpless, into the deep mud as if, also, its day was 
done. We hesitated before we went to work. 
We' knew that, somewhere, away off behind the 
big, dark hills, was Santa Clara, food, and shelter. 
We knew that, somehow, we would raise the car 
from the enveloping mire. We had accomplished 
more difficult tasks, yet we hesitated. The 
flaming clouds darkened into livid fires which 
flickered and went out. There was no twilight. 
In the gloom of ominous night, broken only by 
the slender rays from an oil lamp, we took a new 
reef in our nerve and began another round of 

[69] 



the desperate, elemental fight against the mud. 
One of us searched for long poles to use as pries. 
Another vainly sought to make a solid foundation 
for the jack underneath the car. The others 
collected rocks. We had previously cursed these 
ever-present boulders, which we now welcomed. 
All worn by the day's hard work and with a big 
job before us, we stopped, enchanted, as from the 
faraway hills came the clear, melodious "ah, 
ohs!" of the voceo de ganado — the silver tones 
of the native Cuban, calling home his cattle. 

" Oiga, chico ! " yelled the sanguine Rogelio. 

M Que hay ! " came the answering call. 

Soon white-trousered, bare-footed, dark, wiry 
fellows surrounded the strange vehicle of los 
Americanos. All the wealth of words in the 
Spanish tongue seemed insufficient to express 
their wonderment. Like a small army, guided 
and bullied by their natural leader, they carried 
stones, swung on the long poles, yelled and fussed 
until, one after another, the wheels were raised 
and set on an uncertain floor of rough rocks. 
Waldon jumped to his seat behind the wheel. 
The motor spit and steadied to the old familiar 
purr. The native audience stood tense and 
spellbound. The clutch engaged. With a 
mighty wrench, the big car tore itself free, 
scattering behind a wild volley of stones and 
mud, and jumped to the solid ground ahead. 

" El Toro ! " cried a Cuban. 

" El Toro ! " echoed the chorus. And thus was 
christened the car. 

It was nine o'clock, with headlights going for 

[70] 



the first time on the precious store of gas, when 
we again set out to find Santa Clara. The hills 
were flat-crowned and in quick succession. We 
could see nothing but a narrow streak of yellow 
rock ahead. We seemed always to be rising, 
rising, rising, to the top of everything. Palestine 
must have looked like this on a still, dark night. 
We could almost imagine some Old Testament 
friend would steal out of the dark and bid us 
halt. 

Our entrance to Santa Clara was in sharp 
contrast to the last few hours of wandering in the 
solitude of the black night. We rambled noisily 
over its cobbled streets. We had knocked the 
muffler away from the exhaust pipe on some 
grass-hidden rock, and El Toro roared. The 
whole population ran to the iron-barred windows 
or into the streets to follow us in a curious, 
turbulent stream. 

The hotel landlord welcomed us at the door 
and, as it was now raining hard, hurried to help us 
find shelter for the car. Then we ate a cold and 
disappointing meal in a night owl street cafe. 
An excited little man with a big pad of paper, 
who said he was the reporter of the Santa Clara 
newspaper, persisted in getting an extensive 
interview through the now collapsed interpreter. 
None of us ever read that story, but, judging 
from the manner of the fervid scribe, it must 
have drained empty the possibilities of Cuban 
journalism. 

We retired in a hopeful mood. This had been 
our record day — sixty-three miles. We had gone 

[71] 



to Matanzas, and they said we could not. We had 
crossed rivers and swamps, and they had said we 
could not. In five days we had gone 231 miles 
over country that was said to be impossible for 
any four-wheeled vehicle. We had yet to cross 
the mountains. They said we could not, but we 
thought we could. 

Macagua to Santa Clara — sixty-three miles. 



[72] 




CHAPTER VI 

Does the road wind up-hill all the way ? 

Yes, to the very end. 
Will the day's journey take the whole long day? 

From morn to night, my friend. 

— Christina Rossetti. 

^AMAJUANI is not 
well known. We 
never had heard of 
it until Tuesday, 
January 7, 1908. 
By noon of the same 
day we found that 
there was no place which we 
wished to reach quite so badly 
as Camajuani. We wanted to 
go to a lot of other places, but, to 
reach any of them, we had to go via 
Camajuani. We had driven ourselves into a 
predicament just because we had followed the 
advice of one Fernandez, urbane landlord of the 
Santa Clara Hotel. 

We were bound southeastward from Santa 
Clara, through Placetas. Camajuani is northeast 
of Santa Clara. Senor Fernandez said that it 
was necessary to go through Camajuani to reach 

[75 ] 




Placetas. We believed him. He also told us 
that the heavy rain, which almost obscured the 
rugged mountain range ahead of us, would not 
continue. Again we believed him, although, as 
we eyed the morning prospect, it did not look 
promising to us. 

At noon it continued to rain. Northern rains 
of our previous experience had been mere 
sprinkles in comparison with this tropical down- 
pour. We had come six or seven miles. There 
was no use in going back, because that was just 
as hard as going ahead. Without sun, compass, 
highway, or guide of any kind, we were not much 
surer of the location of Santa Clara than we 
were of the whereabouts of the much-sought 
Camajuani. It was a rough, wet country, looking 
as though nature had dumped here everything 
left over when she tired of molding the rest of 
Cuba into shape. 

Rivers and creeks were at the bottom of each 
red dirt hill, now soaked into muggy slime in 
which the protruding rocks made every inch of 
the way a precarious, uncertain struggle. As 
the hills became higher and the gorges became 
deeper, we came closer to the great ravines of 
the Santa Fe mountain passes. The country 
was rougher than any we had yet tackled. The 
only road we had to follow was the rough irregu- 
lar trillo, or pony trail, across the hills, by way 
of the innumerable ravines, washouts, and river 
beds. 

The first few miles out of Santa Clara were 
over a fairly good macadam road, which gradually 

[76] 



dissolved into a soggy trail of wet clay. The 
first tire to go that day exploded while we were 
wallowing through the deep mud in the lee of a 
ruined Spanish fort. Rogelio, being energetic 
and just as keen for accomplishment as the rest 
of us, volunteered to replace this tire. On 
several occasions he had wished to help us in 
changing the inner tubes or casings. Not wish- 
ing to shirk our own work, however, we spared 
Rogelio and saved him for the pump. Also, on 
many occasions we carefully conserved his energy 
for frequent little skits with the machete, which 
he handled nicely. 

We knocked off work to prowl around the 
ruined fort, which, evidently, had set in the 
center of a much-battled battle-field. When a 
running schedule approximates a mile and a half 
an hour, a few extra minutes spent in sight- 
seeing do not seriously affect it. In the mean- 
time, the rain continued and increased. Wash- 
outs and deep ravines, that we might have 
crossed the day before without serious difficulty, 
were now becoming almost impassable on account 
of the swashy mud. Where this mud was only 
a thin layer of slime over the native rock, the 
hillsides, which we had to climb in a zigzag 
fashion, were so slippery that even the sure- 
footed Cuban ponies we occasionally met on the 
trail would slide and sprawl. 

Between each line of hills ran a river. This 
would be reached by following down a tortuous 
pass or a winding, rough shelf on the side of a 
cliff. Three large rivers were forded. If ever 

[77] 



there had been bridges, they had been burnt. 
Each ford meant a slow, difficult drive through 
water nearly two feet deep and over a treacher- 
ous bottom, partly of stone, partly of loose rock, 
and partly of clay or sand. Sometimes, in 
order to cross a river a hundred yards wide, it 
would be necessary to drive an irregular, oblique 
course an eighth of a mile long. 

When we could not follow the regular path up 
the hillside on the other side of a river, we would 
be compelled to take to the bare side of the hill, 
and go up in any possible direction to the top 
of the bluff, there to find a roundabout way 
back to the trail. Many of the mountain passes 
were so narrow and so furrowed with yawning 
gullies that we were forced to run with one 
wheel on a slightly sloping side wall and the 
other on the narrow crest of the deepest rut. 
This frequently compelled us to cut narrow 
shelves in the rock to form a solid footing for 
the wheels. Both going down the ravines and 
up the opposite ones, driving was a case of slip- 
ping around on the rut brows. Had a wheel 
dropped into one of these ruts, it would have 
meant a long, tedious job of jacking-up on a 
foundation of loose rocks. 

We must have been about a third of the way 
up the highest crest of the Santa Fe mountains 
at noon. The car had tipped sidewise to a rak- 
ish angle, with the left wheels deep in the mud, 
the middle of the car resting on ruts, and the 
right wheels in space, while the whole car was 
pointed upward on a stiff grade. Everything was 

[78] 



soaked, including our box of groceries. We 
opened a can of sausages with a machete, they 
being the only food which the rain had not 
spoiled. 

The worst insult is that which comes from 
one's own brother. As we sat munching our 
mock luncheon, while the rain beat against our 
faces, ran down our backs, flooded our tonneau, 
and washed the bottom out of the ravine we 
were trying to climb, we were greeted by a 
young American surveyor on horseback and 
almost hidden within the ample folds of a rub- 
ber poncho. We explained ourselves and he 
explained himself, and then started to explain 
the Santa Fe mountains. He was quite certain 
that we could never reach the top of the ridge ; 
in fact, he suggested that we would be several 
kinds of profane fools to try. His conversational 
tone implied that he thought we were, anyway. 
His sneering demeanor rankled, We were glad 
when he and his prophecy were gone, and glad 
to meet a couple of black laborers without opin- 
ions but with good muscles. We impressed 
them into service. They helped us dig, scrape, 
and carry stones. We were all fighting mad, 
and we all worked. 

Foot by foot, we made a path for the car up 
the mountain and the car climbed the mountain. 
Gradually, we won the summit of the Santa Fe 
ridge. There was just one house in sight, a 
shack whose rough, slabbed walls were not tight 
enough to keep out the deluge. It was a haven 
of refuge to us, and the poor supper we ate that 

[ 79] 






night on the damp, storm-darkened mountain 
peak was to us a delectable banquet. The night 
was cold. We were roughly bedded on benches 
and in hammocks. 

The farmer, like many others who have homes 
along isolated trails, kept a small supply of 
goods that might be purchased by wayfarers. 
We bought four cotton blankets. All through 
the long, restless hours, a thin-clad little black 
baby wailed most dismally with the cold. That 
was a dreary night for all of us. We knew that 
we had done a lot, but, measured on the map, 
that lot meant exactly fourteen miles. We 
wondered what we would do the next day. We 
wondered where we would have been, had we not 
followed the advice given us at Santa Clara, but 
had gone around the foot of the Santa Fes 
instead of over their worst passes. This, our 
host of the night said, we should have done, as 
the correct route from Santa Clara to Placetas 
lay in almost the opposite direction to the way 
we had taken. 

Santa Clara to Camp Santa Fe — fourteen miles. 



[80] 




CHAPTER VII 

One who journeying 
Along a way he knows not, having crossed 
A place of drear extent, before him sees 
A river rushing swiftly toward the deep, 
And all its tossing current white with foam. 

— Iliad. 

'ATIVES of sunburnt 
islands often are sur- 
prising. There is a 
type of Cuban negro, 
or creole, who is 
modeled after Adonis, 
muscled like Atlas, 
'd and with the disposition of what- 
ever dead and done God it was 
who had the attributes of a 
faithful Newfoundland dog. 
The two men whom we had hired the previous 
evening came back to help us in the morning. 
They were on hand ere we awakened in the 
dark, wet dawn to put on our mud-plastered 
shoes and be dressed. 

Before we ever started the car, we went out 
into the big swamps that lay between the two 
next hills and built a corduroy road of brush 

[83] 




->--' 



and palm trunks. The rain had stopped for the 
moment, but the whole land was water-logged. 
While the two Cubans whacked and slashed at 
brush and palms, we lugged and carried and built 
our road. It takes skill as well as muscle to chop 
wood with a machete. The Cubans had both. 
We marveled that they could be negroes and 
that the strange mixture of Spanish and African 
blood could produce, in a southern country, such 
superb giants. 

To get out of the mountains we had to ford two 
more rivers. One was a typical stream. The 
other was a fast-flowing torrent set down in a 
gorge that had once been bridged, but which now 
had no path leading to a crossing of any kind. 
Ox carts had not yet made a trail through it. 
Only horses had forded. It was a disappointing 
sight, after a week of endeavor such as ours had 
been. Casually, it looked like our finish. We 
hunted up and down its banks for a defile or a 
shelf that we could follow to the bottom. Two 
of us stripped and swam into the river, looking 
for a path where the uneven bed formed ledges 
high enough and wide enough to make a feasible 
route for the car to be driven across. In some 
places immense boulders absolutely blocked our 
way. From the top of the gorge a quartette of 
rural senoritas, apparently shocked, and yet as 
obviously pleased, by this unusual exhibition, 
peeped slyly at us through the grass. 

Finally, with one of us guiding each front 
wheel, the car was driven slowly through the 
river on one of the twisted lines of rock. It was 

[84] 



nearly noon when we reached Camajuani. No 
king ever rode into his capital with finer airs. 
Our Cuban helpers were perched on the running 
boards, their russet hides gleaming in the sun and 
their faces beaming with pride at being a part of 
such an unwonted expedition. We stopped for 
breakfast, having had nothing except a hurried 
cup of very black and very dirty coffee that morn- 
ing. We had come three miles. Our chests 
expanded. Imagine our glee when, in the cafe 
where we awaited our chicken and rice we espied 
our friend, the surveyor. I have this good to report 
of him. He swallowed his previous misjudgment 
of our capabilities with generous congratulations 
and offered to buy us a bottle of Rioja bianco. 

By comparison with the sloppy, muddy ravines, 
the long, wiggling trail of angular rocks between 
Camajuani and Salamanca were, to us, a boule- 
vard. We struck south for Placetas, being just 
as far away from it as when we had left Santa 
Clara. The stony trail gradually led to lower 
land, where there was nothing underneath except 
sloughs, gullies and rivers and nothing above 
except rain and a black, angry sky. 

We had obtained great skill on mud holes. 
We could now tell the hard bottom ones from 
the mires without sounding. Driving to the edge 
of a sort of plateau, there spread before us a plashy 
lowland, which seemed to be nothing but a succes- 
sion of marshes. On the other side rose the hazy 
outlines of a mountain range, but we knew what 
work it would take to reach those hills. We 
knew that the tall grass hid mud holes and ruts 

[85] 



where ox carts had been laboriously dragged 
across. 

As the gloom of the rainy afternoon deepened, 
telling that the meager sunlight was about to 
disappear, we worried along past a picturesque 
old Spanish village, set all alone in the desolation, 
with its ruined cathedral another milestone in 
the path of the recent war. We sought a sugar 
mill, tucked in a corner of the distant hills. The 
history of two days before repeated itself. Again 
we sank into the mud as darkness hid our plight. 

These typical pantanos, or mud holes, are 
simply enlargements of long, narrow rivers of 
mud. You may walk up and down and find no 
place where it is easier to pass than at any other 
place. Where we failed in crossing, either by 
driving carefully over the more solid lumps of 
earth or by rushing the narrowest place, there 
remained just one thing to do: jack up each wheel 
in succession and build a solid foundation of stone 
underneath. With all four wheels in the mud, 
this is a tiresome task, at sun down, in an unknown 
country, and away from even the trace of a town. 

Once up out of the mud and going, we lost 
no time in driving across a field to a farm- 
house we had spied. It offered no accommodation, 
but a short distance on the other side of a muddy 
river was a sugar mill. We left the car standing 
in the rain by the farmhouse and pushed ahead 
on foot, to the mill, for we were too tired and 
hungry to tackle the job of driving the car 
across the river in the darkness. 

At every large sugar mill there is a laborers' 

[86] 



eating house, in combination with the store. 
Both first and second-class meals are served. We 
ate first class and enjoyed it. We could have 
eaten second class and, at least, swallowed it, for 
our appetites had lost all trace of daintiness. 

That night we found out the true meaning of 
hacienda. It is a beautiful Spanish house, set in 
the middle of thousands of acres of sugar cane 
and surrounded by people who live, but appear 
to have no homes. As a wayfarer, you knock 
timidly at the door above the grand staircase 
which is on the outside of the house, because 
there is only one floor to the inside. Through 
the latticed window a female voice shrieks : 

" Que hay ! " and your interpreter reels off a 
thousand words of address, introduction, request, 
and petition. 

Then a man's voice breaks out of the window, 
but the most beautiful Castillian rhetoric, sung 
by the most intelligent interpreter, cannot get 
him to open the door. That is an hacienda. We 
put up at the eating house. 

Over the table on which we had eaten, we 
spread many layers of empty sugar bags, bor- 
rowed from the store, whereat, also, we bought 
some Cuban-made shoes and cigarros arroz. In 
the upper right-hand corner of the room there 
was an acetylene generator. In the lower left- 
hand corner was a baker's oven. Both were busy 
on the night shift. Between these two evils we 
stretched flat on our backs on the table, smoked 
and dropped the burnt cigarettes, one after 
another, on the floor of sun-dried tile. We made 

[87] 



jokes at our own expense and drew our cotton 
blankets closer about our necks as the chill of the 
night increased. 

Toward morning we gave up the endeavor to 
sleep and retired to the kitchen. The charcoal 
fire was almost out and we piled on more fuel. 
We took off our shoes and some of our clothes 
and laid them around the edge of the fire to dry. 
The baker gave us fresh bread and we had the 
first helping of coffee, and eggs fried by dropping 
them into an immense pan of deep grease, which 
appeared to have been used on the same stove, 
in the same pan, for the same purpose, day in and 
day out for several years. Then we sat down to 
await daylight. 

Camp Santa Fe to Camp Convenio — thirteen miles. 



[88] 





CHAPTER VIII 

When I was at home, I was in a better place; 
hit travellers must be content. 

— As You Like It. 

PEOPLE learn rapidly 
under the pressure of 
necessity. When we 
had begun driving over 
the roadless interior of 
Cuba we had favored 
the car. In crossing 
extremely bad places 
^J^j^'^we invariably chose the route 
~~53\ which made the car's task the 



ft \ 

y lightest. Later we learned that 

all the car needed was traction and we began to 

favor ourselves. 

Going back from the sugar mill, in the early 

morning, to the farmhouse where we had left 

El Toro, we noticed two chances of crossing the 

mu ggy river where automobiling in Cuba had 

ceased the night before. One place was wide, 

low, and flat. It meant long hours of tedious 

filling in with brush. The other was a narrow 

cut between two precipitous walls. We chose 

[91] 



the cut, for it required only a few minutes to fill 
the narrow bottom with enough brush to allow 
the car to be driven down one hillside and up 
the other as fast as all its power could take it. 

Our underbrush pontoons were engineering 
triumphs. We knew exactly how much brush 
it required to support the car when driven 
rapidly over one of them. It would have been a 
mere waste of labor to have piled on enough 
brush to allow slow driving, stopping, or recross- 
ing. The whole country was a wide morass. 
We were in the lowland, between two ranges of 
mountains. The only difference between what 
we called mud holes and the rest of the country, 
was that the mud holes had no bottom, whereas 
the hard ground or stone underneath the 
remaining miles of our travel allowed us to 
plow slowly through the surface mire. 

Near the mill we halted before a strange and 
fascinating scene. A dozen heavy carts, loaded 
with sugar cane, that had been left outside the 
mill yard the night before, clogged the only 
available passageway to the country beyond. 
We sat in the car and watched a hundred men 
and fifty straining, tugging bulls try to get the 
heavy carts through the mud, in which they 
settled to their axles. Musical, yet vicious, 
pleading, yet commanding, using goad as well 
as voice, the violent drivers yelled at each strug- 
gling bull by name : 

"Tamarindo! Canario!" 

Often a dozen yelled in chorus. Failing to 
budge the foremost cart, all ceased their efforts 

[92] 



and, wildly gesticulating, argued and wrangled 
while more bulls were brought from a rear cart 
and hitched to the one stuck in the mud ahead. 
It took a dozen of the wide-shouldered, power- 
ful bulls, pulling all together, with all their 
might, to drag each cart to the hard ground in 
the mill yard. In the meantime, scores of idle 
mill laborers, representing every type which the 
island affords, lounged around, dividing their 
attention between the curious struggle and the 
strange sight which we made in our motor car. 
While they watched with curious eyes, they 
pared long sugar canes with skillful flips of their 
machetes and sucked the thin sweetness. 

At last an opening was effected. Straddling 
the gaping ruts, with wheels twisted to the full 
limit of the springs, Waldon drove the car out 
of the mess. Leaving behind a great babel of 
unintelligible tongues, we went on our way 
toward Placetas. Sliding down embankments, 
crossing pools, digging trenches to obtain a foot- 
ing for the wheels in the roughest ravines, we 
reached the bed of a dried river, whose hard 
bottom held only occasional pools of water made 
by the recent rains. We followed this to a hill, 
from whose brow a level path led to Placetas. 

Here was a post of the United States Army 
and the entire force, commissioned and enlisted, 
turned out to welcome us and get what home 
news we had to offer. For seventeen months 
these regulars had been in the little interior town 
and were glad to talk with Americans. They 
told us about themselves and about their 

[93] 



duties. They told us how they had put down 
insurrections without ever firing a cartridge. 
The Cuban is not a coward. Naturally he is a 
fighter, but he knows there is an awful wallop 
in the sinewy fist of Uncle Sam. 

The soldier boys directed us to a trail, among 
four, at the other edge of town. We took the 
wrong one. After many miles of driving over 
the damp lowlands, with all sense of direction 
lost in the dark, sunless day, we learned from a 
passing farmer that we were going straight back- 
ward toward Santa Clara. Also, we found that 
we were on the trail which we should have taken 
before we had been sent up among the hills 
around Camajuani. 

Retracing six or seven miles, we found an old, 
unused trail through the grass and mud, which 
looked like a short cut in the right direction. 
There was no variety and no town. We just 
plugged along in the mud, sweated under the 
hard work of crossing washouts, or worried 
through the tall, damp grass. We knew by our 
watches that the little daylight was about to 
depart, and, so, when we found a used trail, we 
took to it, although we had no idea where it 
went. At least, the trail meant a country store 
or a farmhouse. 

Now it was raining again and we did our best 
to hurry toward a hut, just visible in the waning 
light. Almost in front of it, the front tire 
exploded, while warping the car over the jagged 
rocks of a washout. As we replaced it the 
interpreter negotiated with the storekeeper for 

[94] 



shelter and food. It proved that the whole 
family was sick, and that we could not come in. 
However, we were informed that a tobacco 
grower lived a mile farther on We took the 
tobacco grower for granted, drove through his 
fences and across his fields, and lost not one 
minute of time making the last of our twenty- 
seven miles for the day. When we got to his 
rather pretentious hut, which had two rooms and 
several lesser buildings surrounding it, we told 
Rogelio to inform him that he was our host, was 
very glad to see us, and that we could have 
everything there was in the place to eat. We 
got it. 

They made the meal from the ground up ; 
killing and cleaning guinea hens, roasting and 
grinding coffee — for, like many other farmers, 
this one grew his own coffee — cooking rice, and 
boiling pottage. 

There is every opportunity to eat well in 
Cuba. Where they do not eat well, it is because 
they do not care or know how. Chickens and 
guinea hens are raised without care. There is 
generally a guinea hen or a quail or some other 
fat bird wandering around the house, anxious to 
be shot for breakfast, dinner, or supper. Any- 
thing that you can stick into the ground will 
grow. It is possible to raise coffee on one side 
of the house and sweet potatoes on the other, 
bananas just outside the lean-to and potatoes in 
the front yard. 

There is a funny touch of Cuban innocence in 
their potatoes. They care little for the small 

[95] 



ones which grow down there, and so they ship 
them to the United States, where the Broadway 
hostelries serve them as Bermudas and other 
varieties costing four times the usual price. In 
exchange, Cuba imports the vulgar Irish variety 
at extravagant prices and cares not that half of 
them have rotted away in transit. Bananas are 
the staple vegetable. They are rarely ripened 
and eaten as fruit. Generally, they are picked 
and cooked green, by frying, like potatoes. 

The lack of household economy in eating also 
applies to meats. Although there is plenty of 
fowl and a bountiful supply of vegetables, the 
stock-yards of Chicago have an extensive Cuban 
trade in canned meats, of the doubtful, aged 
varieties. Domestic beef is muscular and better 
adapted to the pulling of ox carts than to the 
delectation of satiated appetites. 

As we sat on the hard benches, in the dirt- 
floored living room, waiting for our supper, 
Rogelio slumbered. The three men of the 
establishment tried to talk with us, but we could 
only point to the peacefully sleeping interpreter. 
Although we protested, the family served our 
meal before it sat down to its own. They 
watched us eat, and then we were almost as 
curious and possibly as unreserved in our candid 
staring while we watched them eat. 

The gathering was an unusual and picturesque 
one — planter in white starched suit, laborers in 
rough, nondescript garb, women in loose calico 
dresses, children in dirty cotton slips, a naked 
baby on the floor, oblivious to surroundings 

[96] 



while it played with a coquettish kitten, and the 
eldest daughter of the house eating thick pottage 
from a large spoon with her fingers. Let it not 
be considered, however, because the senorita of 
the far-away tobacco plantation uses her fingers 
to segregate the meat from the soup, that she is 
a spurious senorita. She has the ordinary and 
universal charm of the backwoods maiden every- 
where. You will notice that literature always is 
prone to get human interest by ringing in a 
peasant lass, a milkmaid, or some other daughter 
of the untonsured meadows. I simply imitate 
literature by offering an olive-tinted senorita who 
shyly glances over a huge spoon, from which she 
picks out choice chunks of chicken with her more 
or less dainty fingers. 

It was a big family for such a small house, and 
they told us we might sleep in the tobacco store 
house. Senorita and seriora departed to prepare 
our beds. Returning, they beamed hospitably, 
and said that they had made better provision for 
us, in another building close to hand. Waldon, 
with the lighted side lamp in one hand, gallantly 
accompanied the ladies as they escorted us to our 
bedchamber. He lost his gallantry and nearly 
dropped the lamp when his glance followed its 
feeble rays into the shed. 

" Carajo ! — and then some in English ! Fel- 
lows, it's a pig pen ! " 

He was right. One half the interior was 
fenced off by a few slabs. Back of the fence 
were a dozen grunting pigs. In front of the 
fence were piles of corn. Above the pigs was a 

[97] 



platform on which was piled more corn. Two 
hammocks were swung on what Crebbin, who 
still had a laugh in him, naively called the 
mezzanine floor. On the ground floor were two 
more hammocks. 

We matched for the mezzanine beds and 
retired. Outside, it rained. Inside, the pigs 
grunted. We made merry. Sleeping with pigs 
was more nearly a joke than a hardship. We 
repeated the name of the locality to ourselves, 
"Casa Cinco." Never will we forget Casa Cinco. 
Bent like half-opened jack knives, in canvas 
hammocks, we talked and laughed, and laughed 
and talked, and fell asleep to the lullaby of 
grunting swine. 

Camp Convenio to Casa Cinco — twenty-seven miles. 



[98] 





CHAPTER IX 

Deficit omne quod nascitur. 
— Quintilian. 

AST WARD lay La 

Gloria, Del Tuerto,De 
Caballete. Three 
mountains, like any 
other mountains, stick- 
ing into the clouds. 
Three mountains, 
below which lay Sancti Spiritus. Like 
Mohammed, the mountains had it on 
us. They would not come to us ; we 
would have to go to them. The 
mountains were not visible in the morning, but 
the planter said they were there. We asked him 
where was Sancti Spiritus, and he said to go to 
the mountains. We asked him how far was 
Sancti Spiritus, and he shook his head. We 
started for the mountains, determined to reach 
Sancti Spiritus that day regardless of conditions, 
distance, or direction. 

The same old acts were rehearsed with new 
scenery. Down gullies we twisted to wide 
rivers, forded them and scrambled up the banks, 

[101] 



only to drop again into marsh or perform on the 
high spots over ruts that the rain could not wash 
out, but which it made slippery beyond descrip- 
tion. We did a lot of driving through fields. 
Where there were fences, they were either of stone 
or barbed wire. The latter consisted of two or three 
loosely drawn strands of wire, held by an occa- 
sional permanent post, but, principally, by loose 
sticks. We cut the wires with pliers, dropped 
the fence, drove into the field, picked up the fence, 
joined its loose ends as best we could and drove 
on. In order to go a mile or two we sometimes 
had to pass through a dozen fields and cut a dozen 
fences. The fields which we preferred to the 
trail were either plowed ground or simply rough 
land which never had been tilled. Always, it was 
covered with stones and it was never level. 

Through the beating rain we rose to the top of 
the ridge which had framed our view, and saw, 
behind us, laid out as on a map, the last river we 
had forded and, in front of us, the next one we 
would have to ford. Away over at the right, 
sharp-nosed Pico Tuerto jutted skyward from 
between its squatter brothers, Caballete and 
Gloria. Each successive hill became higher. 
Each was flat topped like a small plateau. 
Between them were swamps. 

A loquacious dissembler at a small town said 
that a macadam road, a relic of early Spanish 
days, started at the next hill and ran straight to 
Sancti Spiritus. With tire chains broken and 
breaking, as they were dragged over the scraggy 
roads, climb after climb, descent after descent, 



[102] 






we kept at it, in the pouring rain, looking for 
that road just at the top of the next hill. It was 
like trying to catch up with to-morrow. Sancti 
Spiritus was near. We knew that, but night was 
getting nearer. We fretted at delay and took 
unusual chances on the hills. Sancti Spiritus 
assumed the aspect of a myth. 

About the time we had given up hope for the 
day, we found a bridge and then another, and, at 
last, we found the promised highway. It was 
worn and full of holes, but it was high, hard, and 
almost level. The clouds parted and the sun 
beamed a bright farewell, just before it dropped 
from sight behind the mountains. High on a 
neighboring crest was silhouetted against the 
glowing, copper-colored sky a lone block house. 
Below it, between a pair of spreading laurels, stood 
the ruins of a great mansion which had been the 
quarters of some luckless Spanish general who 
allowed the Cubans to shoot him out of house and 
home. A massive stone bridge, weathered by the 
many years throughout which it had served 
generation after generation, led us over the last 
river. We climbed the last hill. Below us 
spread the red roofs of Sancti Spiritus. 

The town received us boisterously. Each 
crooked street filled with noisy crowds of men, 
women, and children, who darted from their homes 
to chase after us to the hotel, even as though 
there was nothing else in Sancti Spiritus to think 
of that evening. Sancti Spiritus was innocent in 
automobiles, but it had heard of us. By mail 
had come the Santa Clara paper, telling about 

[103] 



the Americans in the automobile which was 
named El Toro. 

In the immense bedroom of the ancient hotel, 
while we waited for water to be brought that we 
might wash, we sat on the edges of the canopied 
beds, looked at each other, and merely laughed. 
There was something ridiculous in being there. 
The adventure was over. We had come to the 
mountains. 

Why ? Because. 

The story of Saturday, loitered away in this 
peculiar and venerable town, is another story. 
Dressed in odds and ends of garments picked up 
at the local stores, to replace the mud-covered, tat- 
tered clothes we had worn continuously for a week 
and a half, we strayed around its crooked streets, 
posed in the plaza that the wondering children 
might gaze upon us, and lounged in the hotel 
courtyard among the flowers. Across the corner 
from the plaza stands the oldest cathedral in 
Cuba, weatherbeaten, but proudly rising over the 
low tiled houses of the town. It represents a 
civilization and an art which is wasted on the 
reconstructed Cuban. The latter has no apparent 
reverence for the picturesque architecture and 
the quaint religious figures housed within its 
crumbling walls. 

The Supreme Being of that vicinity was Captain 
Wise. His headquarters were on a hill overlook- 
ing the town, and he commanded a company of 
United States marines, who had built comfortable 
quarters and spent their time going through the 
motions of military life, playing baseball and 

[ 104 ] 



performing the duties of an army of pacification 
in charge of a lot of scrappy islanders, who, from \ 
el Seiior Alcalde to el peon, were, after all, noth- 
ing but spiggoties in the eyes~of an American 
private soldier. 

It was good to be among these child-like 
American boys. We had done a little fighting 
ourselves, of a different kind. We had gone 
through districts where all Cuba said we could 
not go. We had accomplished the impossible 
and were satisfied. Mingled with our pride, 
however, was a new respect for these greatest of 
soldiers, and, like them, having done what we had 
come to do, we wanted to go home. There was 
a little bit of extra sentiment that night, with all 
of the Americans in the place gathered at head- 
quarters, waiting for retreat to sound, when, under 
La Gloria's shadow, at the sinking of the sun, the 
stars-and-stripes dropped upon the blood-red soil 
of new-old Cuba. 

Now for the anti-climax, for it is an anti-climax 
to load an automobile onto a flat car, in the dark- 
ness which shrouds such a town as Sancti Spiritus. 
It is an anti-climax to be dragged away at dawn by 
a wheezy engine over the wabbly, rusted tracks 
of a stray branch railway. It is an anti-climax 
to sit at a wayside station like Zaza del Medio, 
waiting for the daily train to Havana, that gay 
decoy which draws tourists to Cuba. It is an 
anti-climax, after one has come hundreds of miles 
in an automobile over land which no vehicle was 
ever meant to traverse, and, then, at the sight of a 
fussing, careening sample of a railway train, to 

[ 105] 



dig deep into your pockets for the wherewithal 
to purchase a mere ticket. We had left on 
hand little of the coin of the realm — any old 
realm, Spanish or American. So, trying to for- 
get who and when and where we came from, we 
gave up our little mite for seats in the second- 
class carriage. 

All night we sat in frozen silence by the open 
windows, eying in tired disgust the dirty black 
Cubans who shared our torture. We had not 
come for this, but now we realized what we had 
come for. We had come to make good on the 
roadless wastes. This railway coach was not 
Cuba ; the Cuba we knew was over at Casa Cinco, 
where the pig pens have mezzanine floors and 
serve as hotels. We were going back to Havana. 
Havana was not Cuba ; Cuba was at the top of 
the Santa Fe mountains, where the rain washes 
the traveler's hopes down the hillside and leaves 
him staring into the dark, cold night, speculating 
on the whereabouts of Camajuani. 

Trundling along behind, on a flat car, was an 
automobile. It was more than an automobile, 
as it had an identity of its own. It was El Toro. 
There were no other Packards like it. It had 
done more than we had done, for we simply had 
given it a chance. We simply were engineers 
in traction. We had found a path. Surely the 
Cubans had named it right, when they called it 
The Bull. 

In the morning we would find Havana, money, 
new clothes, passage to the United States and 
the frozen north from whence we had come. 

[ 106] 



What of it? 

You can't railroad memory. Technically, we 
were leaving Cuba. In reality, we stayed ; stayed 
there where our recollections were and where we 
had learned the greatness of a philosophy which 
makes a man do things — just because. Some 
day we are going back, we hope. Some day, 
when the new government has spent its thirty 
millions of dollars and built its many highways. 
We are going back to rush over the country in El 
Toro; to dash, in reckless flight, by the same 
places where we struggled up the hills inch by 
inch. 

Why? Just because. 

Casa Cinco to Sancti Spiritus — twenty-eight miles. 
Havana to Sancti Spiritus — 313 miles. 



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